Thursday, January 25th, 2007

On The One Hand There Are Battle Axes, On The Other There Are Gun Runners

Some landlords may be hard-assed old battle axes but at least they’re not gun runners:

A Brooklyn landlord who once smuggled high-powered sniper rifles to Kosovo guerrillas is now at the center of a more domestic dispute.

Tenants in a Carroll Gardens building are taking their landlord, Florin Krasniqi, to court, claiming he is using a ploy to kick them out of their rent-regulated homes.

The six low-income families live in a four-story walk-up at 137 Nelson St., where all the apartments are either rent-stabilized or rent-controlled. The tenants, some of whom have lived in the building for more than 40 years, pay between $350 and $550 a month.

. . .

The tenants’ attorney, Michael Weisberg, said he wasn’t aware of Krasniqi’s intrigue-filled past, which was detailed in a 2005 PBS documentary, “The Brooklyn Connection.”

“No way. Wow. That doesn’t bother me,” Weisberg said of Krasniqi’s history as a gun-runner. “I’ve met him. He didn’t seem particularly dangerous. He seemed like a jackass landlord.”